Many of the bites occur in countries like India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam -- countries that not only have larger populations of venomous snakes, but which also have poorer rural populations that may not have access to proper emergency medical treatment.
Dr. Ryan Stanton -- the emergency medicine physician who treated Couch at the University of Kentucky Medical Center -- said that, by contrast, care for snakebites in the U.S. is nearly always close by. He added that, even though medical centers in the U.S. see a fairly large number of snakebites every year -- "and there are a lot of bites we don't see," he notes -- only a few of these victims die if they are treated quickly.
"So, this is a very low-fatality event; it's very rare for someone to die," he said. "But it is certainly severe enough for someone to die."
Although most who are bitten do not die, venomous snakes are widely feared. Ed Smith, a biologist at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., has had his own experience with being "envenomated" -- what most would call getting bitten by a poisonous snake.
In Smith's case, the snake in question was a rattler.
"I was in my early 20s and working at a zoo," he recalled, adding that, because of his relatively young age and good health, "It was a very good time for a bite."
Good time or not, Smith said the bite was extremely painful -- "like sticking a soldering iron in your arm and keeping it there for however long," he chuckled.
Smith said he doesn't like to dwell so much on snakebites for the very reason that he feels these usually gentle creatures have been demonized for this aspect of their behavior.
"From my perspective, they are one of the pinnacles of evolution ... in that they are so elegantly fashioned to do the work that they do," he said. "These are really amazing creatures, and they're under threat from encroachment and also a bad-spirited nature among people that consider them to be vermin that require eradication."
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